Olmert Faces Fresh Round in Battle for Survival

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday faced a major challenge to his pledge to stay in power, a protest rally that organizers hope will draw at least 100,000 people demanding he resign over the Lebanon war.

Ahead of the demonstration in Tel Aviv’s Yitzhak Rabin Square, calls for Olmert to quit echoed in a parliamentary debate on an inquiry’s scathing criticism of his decision to launch last year’s 34-day campaign against Hezbollah guerrillas.

“We have to go back to the people and let them have their say,” opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, urging an early general election – a ballot that opinion polls show his right-wing Likud party would win.

Despite a number of cracks since the Winograd Commission issued its interim report on Monday, Olmert’s governing coalition has held together, with little apparent appetite among its members for an election that could go Netanyahu’s way.

On Wednesday, Olmert fended off a public call to resign from Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and won critical support from loyalists in their centrist Kadima party.

Israelis have long been accustomed to internal tensions in their coalition governments and relations between Olmert and Livni, who would be poised to replace the prime minister if he stood down, have been strained for months.

Olmert and Livni sat side-by-side in their assigned seats in the legislature for the debate, largely ignoring each other.

“In any other country, the government would have resigned,” Danny Yatom, a legislator belonging to Olmert’s main coalition partner, the Labour Party, told parliament.

Labour holds a leadership election on May 28 that could determine whether it remains in the government. Israel’s next general election is due in 2010.

Olmert accepted responsibility for “many mistakes” during the war in which Hezbollah rained 4,000 rockets on Israel in a blow to the Middle East’s mightiest military and Israeli planes bombed southern Beirut, one of the militant group’s strongholds.

But he said he would not resign, insisting he was the best man to put things right – an argument Netanyahu challenged.

“Those who failed at war cannot be the ones who correct the failures,” Netanyahu told parliament.

The battle then moved to the square where a mass demonstration in 1982 had showed public dissatisfaction with Israel’s Lebanon invasion that year.

“Our message will be that leaders who make mistakes that cost lives should put their keys on the table and go,” said organizer Mickey Leibovitch.

Some 1,200 people were killed in Lebanon, including about 900 civilians, while 117 Israeli troops died along with 41 civilians caught in rocket strikes.

Agencies

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